Adolf Hitler taken by authorities

Adolf Hitler Campbell (3) and his two younger sisters have been taken from their home by the authorities.

For those who didn't catch the news before, his idiotic parents were denied a birthday cake with Adolf's name on it by a local supermarket.

The father, Heath Campbell, said

They're just names, you know. Yeah, they (the Nazis) were bad people back then. But my kids are little. They're not going to grow up like that.

However, Heath reportedly denies the Holocaust and their home is decorated with swastikas.

So what to think of the action taken by the authorities? Is there any abuse of the children? If they are great parents otherwise, and their asinine naming and other Nazi adulation is the only thing on them, then what to think of the situation? Is the removal of the kids justified?

Many people would perhaps contend the parents can't possibly be in their right minds, and that we should expect them to at least greatly influence their children on the subject of Nazism and the Holocaust. Is this kind of indoctrination child abuse?

Bottom line for me is that I feel so, so sorry for these three kids. They could lose their parents because of their parents' stupid choices, or they could grow up indoctrinated, idolizing Hitler, denying the Holocaust, and thinking less of Jews, blacks, and homosexuals. In this case I have a hard time telling what's worse.

5 comments:

Well I may be a radical, but I have consistently claimed that bringing up your children to believe that the fate of the world and its inhabitants is determined by a great big entity in the sky is nothing but child abuse. So, according to this stance, 90% of parents should have their children taken away. So you see, some craziness is tolerable, some other less so.

It's hard to say if the system has the right to take the children away. While clearly the parents have low moral fiber, so do lots of parents who don't lose their kids. However, the naming thing might be case-worthy. After all, they emancipated "Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii" because they considered the name child abuse, and I'd rather be Talula than Adolf. That poor boy is going to be ridiculed at best for the rest of his life, and possibly much, much worse. I mean, would you hire Adolf Hitler? It might just constitute abuse.

In America all names are legal, but they try to persuade parents not to name their kids crazy things. When I named my second son, I asked about the rules, and they told me some stories. The mother who wanted to name her daughter 'Sex' was made to change her mind, while they failed at doing so with another whose child was named 'Abcdef.' If they even did try to talk to his parents, it's very sad that no one managed to change the minds of Adolf's parents.

If there really isn't any abuse (other than the names) or neglect, though, I think it sets a dangerous and disturbing precedent. The social faction in power makes the rules, remember. And right now the over-the-top Christian right is the social faction most in power. If we can take babies away from neo-Nazis because of their (admittedly horrible) ideology, why can't they decide to take babies away from dirty atheists whose ideology is blasphemous, makes Jesus cry, and, they might argue, must "inevitably" lead to child abuse?

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

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